Alyne Harris feels right at home during the Downtown Festival & Arts Show. After all, the 73-year-old painter lives only a few blocks from this weekend’s event, where 100,000 people will be able to view her work.
Folk artist Alyne Harris doesn’t have far to go to draw inspiration for her paintings. It’s a simple matter of sitting on the front porch of her home in the Porters community of downtown Gainesville and gazing skyward.
“I look at the heavens and I meditate,” she said. “I think ’bout what God’s made. I get myself quiet and I think. Ideas start coming to me.”
Those ideas might include the wonders of nature, such as flowers, birds and bumblebees, or memories of her early childhood or perhaps growing up in the segregated South before Civil Rights.
Her mind in a creative mode, Harris retreats to the solitude of her well-lit kitchen, takes brush in hand and works into the evening transferring her ideas onto a canvas. The result is folk art that is simple yet powerful.
“Her sense of composition and color—everything that goes into her paintings—is very, very good,” said Donna Drake, who as the city’s Artsreach coordinator for many years was one of the first to recognize Harris’s artistic talents. Today, Drake owns at least 25 paintings by Harris.
This weekend, Harris and the work of 230 other artists will be on display at the 34th Downtown Festival & Art Show. The juried show, with $17,000 in prizes, takes place on downtown streets from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday. (For a complete list of artists and full entertainment schedule, visit the Downtown Festival & Art Show website.)
Harris, however, will be only one of a handful of artists who can say they live and work in downtown Gainesville.
In fact, Harris has lived in Gainesville for all of her 73 years. She was born on March 25, 1942, and was raised in the area near Mount Pleasant Cemetery on Northwest 13th Street.
“They called that area Paradise back then. It was country out there, where Sam’s Club is now,” she said. “The old graveyard was two blocks down the road from us. We’d play there sometimes and make angels in the sand.”
Most of her neighbors were farmers.
“They raised corn, cabbage, greens and peas and taters, and they had chickens running about,” Harris said. “There was a man down the road who had cows, and we used to tote milk home in a jar. The iceman would come out there twice a week and put ice in the icebox. We didn’t have no refrigerator or electricity back then. We had kerosene lamps for light.”
Alyne (pronounced A-leen) Harris said she had a good childhood, with wonderful memories of her Aunt Viola’s syrup cookies and playing outdoors, but that adults were more strict back then than they are today.
“You had to do what you was told. We did our own laundry in washtubs and pumped the water. When we went somewhere, we had to tell Mama where we was goin’ and what time we was gonna be back,” she said. “Parents nowadays don’t raise children like that.”
Harris will also tell you that growing up after World War II, before the Civil Rights era, was not easy. She remembers having to go to a back window to order fried chicken, seafood and hushpuppies at Capt’n Louie’s Galley on Northwest 13th Street. Her mother could only enter the back door of the UF sorority where she was a housekeeper.
Blacks were at a disadvantage, especially when it came to education.
“We wasn’t allowed in the white library,” Harris said. “We couldn’t get the same books white folks got. Some things you might want to study about, like the heart or a science project, you couldn’t. We had a black library at Lincoln High School. That was the only library we could use.”
Harris goes so far as to call herself “a victim of segregation.”
But even in those early years, when she was 8 or 9, there were hints of a future artist. She and her sister Josie often played in the backyard sand, but then they would mix the sand with water from the hand pump.
“My sister used to make mud cakes and my grandmama would say to us ‘Ya’ll got enough water from that pump. You better not get no more!’ Well, I would sit there and take a little stick and draw angels in the mud cakes,” Harris said. “My brother, who was shooting marbles and stuff like that, would come and erase them all.”
A few years later, during a bible meeting at Mount Pleasant United Methodist Church, Pastor Daniel McClain called on Alyne to share her interest in art with other members of the congregation.
“He told Mama, ‘This girl here got a gift,’” Harris said. “Reverend McClain was tellin’ people what the spirit was givin’ him to tell people. ‘You better do those things!’ is what Mama told me.”
However, life got in the way of an artist’s career. Harris raised two children and worked a variety of jobs to make ends meet. Her employers included the University of Florida. Morrison’s Cafeteria, the Old College Inn and Ideal Cleaners.
Harris was in her 30s with two teenagers before she finally found time to take nighttime art classes at Santa Fe Community College. One of her instructors, the late Lennie Kesl, was once quoted as saying, “I’ve learned much more from Alyne than Alyne ever learned from me.”
She displayed some of her paintings during the early years of the 5th Avenue Arts Festival and began receiving ribbons for her work. At one show, Drake was taking photos of local artists and their works when she saw one of Harris’s paintings of an old woman on a porch and chickens running around in the yard.
Drake helped spread the word about Harris. She got the attention of local collectors Don Cavanaugh and Ed Blue, who ended up purchasing 300 of Harris’s paintings over the years. Jeanne Kronsnoble, a gallery owner in Clayton, Ga., and a huge fan of Harris’s “naïve” work, then challenged Cavanaugh and Blue to sell some of those pieces.
“She said if we don’t get out and put Alyne on the map, she would no longer buy or sell anything of ours,” Cavanaugh said.
Blue and Cavanaugh sold many of the paintings to other collectors at the Slotin Folk Art Festival in Atlanta. One year, Harris joined them there and did paintings in their booth. Her work has been displayed in museums from Tallahassee and Memphis to New York City.
“Alyne is one of the people I like most in life,” Cavanaugh said. “I’ll ask her to paint me some angels and I might end up with watermelons, but that’s part of the charm. It’s whatever comes into her head—or maybe it’s because she’s out of blue paint!”
Blue, Cavanaugh’s partner of 40 years, said that Harris’s paintings speak to him.
“There is an immediate emotional response to them,” he said. “The happiness, the sorrow. You can see her life in her paintings.”
Harris said she is grateful to Cavanaugh and Blue and all the people who helped promote her artwork.
“I don’t know about being a star, but I became sorta famous,” she said with a laugh. “I won’t brag on myself too much though. I just kept doing more and more of it, that’s all I got to say.
“I keep having have all these art ideas. I’m always lookin’ at stuff. Trees and nature. Fall and spring. The color of the leaves. The color of the trees. It comes back to fall, spring and winter with me.”
Harris participates in four Alachua County art shows each year—the Tioga and Santa Fe spring shows and Thornebrook Village and Downtown Festival fall shows.
“The main part about it is she’s having fun,” said Nellie Watts, a neighbor and assistant who takes her to all her shows and other appointments.
“I’ve known Alyne for 30 years,” said Linda Piper, events coordinator for the City of Gainesville’s Cultural Affairs Division. “She’s a very loving person and so well known in our community. In the early years, our department helped Alyne become known. Today, so many people collect her artwork.”
“My mother always taught me to be yourself and nobody but yourself.”
–Alyne Harris
When not painting, Harris keeps busy with the foster grandparents program and activities at Mount Pleasant United Methodist Church—the same church she attended as a girl. Her son, Troy Maddox, lives with her in the Porters community. Her daughter, Katrina Hills, lives in Georgia. Harris also has two grandchildren and one great-granddaughter that help keep her grounded.
“With Christ in my life, I don’t act like a big shot or nothing. My mother always taught me to be yourself and nobody but yourself,” she said.
When asked if she ever gets tired of painting, Harris scoffed.
“No, I don’t get tired,” she said. “I might rest one day but then pick it up the next day. I get a lot of joy out of painting.”
— Noel Leroux
Look for Alyne Harris at the Downtown Festival and Art Show in Booth 102, on Southeast 1st Avenue between 1st and 2nd Street.
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